A snippet of personality from the building’s past came to life when workers went into an attic of the historic railway station on Columbia Street.
No, paranormal believers, it wasn’t a ghost. What the crew renovating the former Canadian Pacific Railway building discovered was a collection of what appeared to be freight records that were more than a century old. The station is being prepared to be reborn as a Kelly O’Bryan’s restaurant. It had sat empty since The Keg restaurant closed its doors in January 2013.
The historic haul was found in an attic on the building’s east side in an area not used by The Keg. It had formerly served as the railway administrative offices.
It’s not unusual, said architect Robert Billard, who is overseeing the renovation project, to find newspapers in the walls of old buildings because they were often used as liner in the late 1800s and into the 1900s.
“It pretty much hadn’t changed since it was part of the railway station offices. Up in the attic, the contractor found a whole bunch of paper scattered around,” said Billard.
“On a couple of shelves there were a bunch of weigh bills, shipment tracking (forms), there were some unused forms typical of what a weigh station back then would be using.”
So Billard contacted Oana Capota, curator for the New Westminster Museum and Archives, to pick them up.
An initial look revealed the weigh bills appear to be 1912 and 1913 freight records from companies the CPR owned – the Canadian Pacific Navigation Company and the Dominion Express Company.
A little research showed CP Navigation was started by John Irving, the son of Captain William Irving, builder of New Westminster’s historic home on Royal Avenue. John sold it to the CPR in 1901. Dominion Express appeared to be a courier company that operated from Chilliwack to the Lower Mainland delivering animals and agricultural implements.
“It’s so dusty we actually have to probably clean them off before we can process them,” said Capota. “It’s kind of neat to see this. Obviously, we still want to look into this. I’m really curious about who everybody is. Some of the names we have here it might be fun to do a bit of detective work one day.”
She said the papers were so brittle that when one of them was picked up a corner just fell off.
“All of us were pretty careful, but when one of the workers picked it up it almost disintegrated,” said Capota.
Billard isn’t new to renovating old buildings. He did quite of few when he worked in Halifax.
“I’m always interested to see what you might find. Doing renovations as an architect is both rewarding and challenging because you never know what you’re going to find,” said Billard. “Unfortunately, you find a lot of things you don’t want to find in terms of structural problems. But when you find something that really kind of gives the building a personality, gives it some character and certainly some history – and sometimes you find odd things, old photographs and those kind of things – your brain starts to put together little stories. It’s fun.”
The station was built by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1899 with wings added on both sides in 1911. The Keg moved into the building in 1973, but closed in 2013 because of structural issues. However, Billard said The Keg didn’t use the east wing where the documents were found because access to the area was from the outside.
“It looked like some people may have worked up there,” said Capota. “It was a real hot, muggy space so I feel sorry if anybody did have to work there back in 1912 and 1913. That could not have been pleasant.”
O’Bryan’s has two locations in each of the Kamloops and Kelowna areas as well as Vernon, Nanaimo and Kitsilano (Burrard Street and West Seventh Avenue).
According to the chain’s website, O’Bryan’s founder Reg Henry worked at the New West Keg in the early 1970s when he was a student at UBC. No opening date has been set because of the extensive renovation, but Henry told The Record in February the company would be spending a couple million dollars on it.
Every time Billard went past the building following The Keg closure, the New Westminster resident has wished somebody would do something with it. Now he gets to do it.
“We’ve taken an awful lot of care to make sure we’re not altering the exterior of the building in any way that is identifiable as part of the renovation. Certainly on the inside, bringing it all up to today’s standards and making sure it works for the new business, yeah, it’s been an exciting project,” said Billard.
Capota is excited for two reasons – to have a new restoreant in two and to see the grand ol’ building being used.
“It’s kind of sad when it sits empty. I had been inside once while The Keg was leasing it, and it just seemed to be lacking in life. So it will be good to see it again. Hopefully, once the people go in there when it’s a restaurant, they can appreciate the history, too.”
